


Pleasure Past & Anguish Past

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
Genre: Body Horror, Cemetery, Dead-End Small Towns, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Halloween, Horror, Nature Horror, Past Character Death, Pre-Canon, Trick or Treat: Trick, Uncanny Flowers, came back wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-24 13:44:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21100430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: They say you never really leave the glen, not even when you die.





	Pleasure Past & Anguish Past

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).

They buried her in the brief thaw after the first snow, on a cold and dripping day. The churchyard was empty and cold, just the rector, Laura, Lizzie, and the undertaker, eyes and noses streaming in the wind from up the glen. It wasn’t right, this weather, burbling up like winter’s breath at the tail end of October, before the snows should have, by rights, fallen at all. But the ground (and for this Lizzie thanked whatever immortal power might have control over their world-- she was no longer sure it was God) wasn’t yet frozen bone-stiff, and so they laid Jeanie in the dark earth, like a final returning to the womb. 

The tears froze on Lizzie’s face as the undertaker placed the last shovelful of earth atop the grave. The rain turned to sleet, mixing with the brown and orange leaves, falling as the bell tolled out its mournful chimes from the steeple of the old church. She tugged her scarf about her neck, wrapped her shawl tighter, wished she could’ve looked less dowdy for Jeanie’s burial. She’d always been chattering about fine clothes and pretty ribbons, happy as a finch in May, hating winter as much for its chapped noses, itching shawls, and piled scarves as for the cold monotony of the snows. 

“The city,” she’d say to Lizzie, “the city’s where I’ll go.” 

And Lizzie, who loved the glen as much as she hated it, shook her head. Girls like them didn’t 

leave. They were bound in blood to the rocks and trees, bound by birth to the soil and the rushing water. She’d chased the dreaming from her bones and left only harsh practicality, only the certain notion that she’d rot in the glen until she died, and then her flesh would feed the glen for another generation of unhappy girls whose dreams died in the December firelight with the old year. 

_Daisies_, Lizzie thought, _I’ll plant daisies. And Jeanie’s ghost can dance among them and weave them into crowns. _

She and Laura took the long way home along the carter’s track, the road all frigid muck, the sleet becoming snow. Laura blubbered and snuffled all the way home, but Lizzie tried to smile at her. They were sisters. She was older. It was the thing to do. 

“Will Jeanie be cold in the ground all alone?” Laura asked. 

“She’s only sleeping, until all the dead wake at the final day,” Lizzie said. “She’s dreaming beautiful dreams of heaven.” 

But these were all lies, Lizzie knew. Jeanie rotted and heaven was a beautiful dream for the living, and Jeanie would never wake up again. Laura smiled at her sister’s reassurance, and Lizzie’s heart broke again as they made their way along the hedgerows, as they came to their own poor doorway, their own vegetable garden whitening under the insouciant snow. Inside, a new quiet had descended over the house, a different quiet now than the one that had been before. It felt fuller, pregnant with loss. 

The quiet had descended in stages, first with each of their parents’ deaths, and then with Jeanie’s. Now she was gone, who knew what could happen? Things might be different, or perhaps they’d be the same, and they’d forget her name at last. 

“Get your wet things off,” Lizzie said to Laura, more sharply than she meant to. “And go and put on something dry before you catch your death.” 

Laura raced away into the back bedroom, which had been Mother and Father’s and was now theirs. Lizzie watched her go, then peeled off her own wet woolens like the outer layer of a chrysalis, and wondered if, by bringing them home the long way in the snow, she hadn’t started digging her own grave. 

*** 

The snows came and went, and in the spring as the green returned by measures to the glen, Lizzie ventured to the graveyard and to Jeanie’s poor, bald grave, the earth still looking churned. She planted daisies carefully, and sipped some brandy in honor of her friend. The April sun was bright and buttery, and Laura leaned back on her heels to wipe her sweating forehead, anxious to get back to the business of forgetting, the business of learning to live in a world forsaken by all things good and light. But in that moment, she thought she felt Jeanie near her, and smiled, for soon the daisies would blossom, and though it would be a pale imitation of Jeanie’s vibrancy, they’d bring back some of the world’s beauty. 

Lizzie went home feeling lighter than she had in months. 

*** 

May came with a shower of dew, and June brought the roses, and July the meadowlarks, and still the daisies did not bloom. The earth of the grave looked as torn as ever. 

*** 

In October, near the day when Jeanie died a year before, Lizzie went down to the cemetery once more. She brought brandy and she wore her new shawl, and she took the long way around the village. On the wind, she heard the faint voices of children, singing for soul-cakes. She looked down the winding lane, and saw the tremulous gleams of turnip lanterns. 

Laura was out there in the dark somewhere, too old by far for turnip lanterns, but too young for dumb suppers and tossing apple peels over her shoulder. Lizzie had sent her down to the village to help one of the widows with her soul-cakes, and she smiled to think of her warm. The wind blew autumn-sharp, carrying in it a swirl of dry leaves, a tangle of children’s voices. 

She came to the old, crooked gate of the cemetery, squealing in the breeze, appallingly noisy. Tree branches thrashed against the moon, and Lizzie heard the gate squeak shut behind her. She made her way gently to Jeanie’s grave, where the daisies still did not grow, trying not to think of fairy stories. 

It was Jeanie who’d always been the one for tales, always talking like an old woman about the goblins in the glen. She’d claimed to have met them the summer before she died, and always spoke of them with a secret smile on her face, proud of her knowledge. 

“I’ll sell the fruit, maybe,” she said. “It’ll get me out of here. There’s no such fruit in any town, you know. It’s grown on the flowers of the glen.” 

And Laura always listened to Jeanie, held rapt by her stories, while Lizzie bustled busily about, cleaning surfaces and kneading bread and sternly lecturing the both of them for being too concerned with ghosts and fairy stories. She wished she’d stayed and listened more often. 

Lizzie sat down on the damp earth by Jeanie’s grave, and took the brandy and the soul-cake from her bag. She would have her own dumb supper, here among the tombstones growing up like rotted teeth. She poured some brandy for herself, and some for Jeanie, and waited for something to happen, for a ghost to rise, for a presence to be felt. Lizzie didn’t really think that Jeanie would truly appear, but she wanted to believe for just one night. And so, she would not speak, but eat her meager excuse for a dumb supper all the cold night long. 

Perhaps it was the brandy and perhaps it was the cold, but before long, Lizzie found her eyelids drooping as she sat, waiting for something she knew would never come. The wind whined pitifully in the naked trees, but she still found herself slumping into the welcome oblivion of sleep. Her dreams were dark and misty things, full of strange flowers and of Jeanie’s face. 

When she woke, it was to the cold stroking of fingers across her cheek. 

“Who’s there?” Lizzie cried, breaking the silence of the dumb supper in a shattering rain of words. 

“Oh, Lizzie, you shouldn’t have said anything,” said a familiar voice. “They’ll surely find you now.” 

“Jeanie?” 

“Who else?” 

Lizzie looked up, half in disbelief, twisting herself about to look behind her. In the ragged moonlight, Jeanie stood before her, smiling in a rictus grin. 

“Jeanie! Jeanie, oh Jeanie!” 

Lizzie stood, hoping to embrace her, but Jeanie stepped back. 

“Oh, Lizzie, please don’t. You’re too late.” 

She looked more closely at her friend now that the euphoria and grief had worn off. Jeanie’s dress was tattered nearly to ribbons, her hands and face filthy with dirt, and her hair lank and limp about a drawn, chalky face, thin lips, pale eyes. And in those staring eyes there was no mirth and no joy. They gleamed like lanterns, and Lizzie couldn’t look away. 

“I thought you were dead,” she said, her voice choked and full with sobs. 

“Sometimes I wish that I was. And sometimes I wish you had never planted daisies on my grave. Flowers do strange things here.” 

Jeanie gestured towards the grave plot, and Lizzie saw the churned earth, and an eerie glow, not unlike the glow of Jeanie’s eyes. The ghost-light rose in fragments from the earth, like fireflies dancing in the summer, or will-o’-the-wisps in the peatbog, and Lizzie blinked to remind herself that this was no dream. 

Slowly, achingly, the light resolved itself into shapes, spectral tendrils unfurling from the earth. It was not simply light, but plants instead, beautiful in all their ghostly glow. They became stems and vines, a garden atop Jeanie’s empty tomb. And there among them were small, white blooms. Daisies. Lizzie’s throat tightened, and she watched their blossoming for long minutes before she understood. 

“Where did these go during the day?” she asked. 

In answer, Jeanie raised her arms, and Lizzie noticed they were bedaubed not with filth but with dried blood and small holes. 

“Into me. They feed upon my flesh and from my bones, flowers grow. I am their home, and that is why I only seemed to die. They need life so they may live.” 

These were why no grass grew on Jeanie’s grave. These flowers, spooling inside Jeanie’s corpse until evening, took all the warmth and goodness from the soil. They bound her to the soil. 

_Did the fruits Jeanie ate come from the wasted, dead bodies of other girls just like her? _

The cemetery was suddenly hostile, unwholesomeness permeating its very air, no longer a place of quiet rest and gentleness. The wind stunk like the breath of a tomb, but still Lizzie stood there with Jeanie, whose corpse-like arms were raised. 

“They’ll grow flowers in you too,” Jeanie said. “Once you’ve eaten the fruit. You want to leave the glen, and they can’t let you do that, because the flowers keep the glen safe, and those who wish to leave must stay.” 

“But you didn’t want to stay.” 

“I was wrong. The flowers set me right.” 

Something black and muddy began to drip from Jeanie’s eyes, thick and tarry. But they still glowed, hungry and bright. 

“Stay with me, Lizzie,” she gurgled. “Eat the fruit and touch the leaves. We’ll be in hell, but we’ll be in hell together.” 

Her cold hands grasped Lizzie’s, and their slimy dampness seemed to crawl all the way to her bones. 

“I have a sister,” Lizzie said. “She’ll be missing me.” 

“Forget Laura. You broke the dumb supper’s rules. Because you spoke, you half belong to us already.” 

A tendril of a vine dripped from the corner of Jeanie’s mouth. It swung at her lips, and she reached up to tuck it back between her teeth. 

“This isn’t you,” Lizzie whispered. “It can’t be.” 

Jeanie grinned, revealing more leaves between her teeth, a daisy beginning to push its way through her smile. 

“It’s all that’s left of me. It’s all that can be left. And I’m dying for company- No!” 

The coldness flickered out of Jeanie’s eyes for one moment, the leaves withered and retreated, and she was there again, a shivering, shaking girl in a ragged dress. The vines retreated somewhat from her mouth. 

“Run, Lizzie!” she gasped. “The flowers want you now, but they’ll settle for Laura, if the goblins get her. Leave here! Leave me!” 

And then the pale light returned to her eyes, and her claw-like hands snaked out again, but Laura dodged their grasp as the wind increased to a desperate wail. Lizzie began to run, her shawl trailing behind her, her breath coming short and fast, all desperation in her quest to reach the half-closed gates. 

“I’m sorry, Jeanie,” Lizzie whispered as she reached them, her hands colliding with the stone wall. “I can’t stay, and I don’t know how to help you leave. But I’ll remember you good and glad, sun and rain, and I’ll save you. You and me and Laura. We’re all getting out of this glen, even if I’ve got to dig you up and tear the roots out of you to do it.” 

She pushed open the gate, and it screamed behind her like a restless, hungry spirit, mingling with the cries of the thing that had taken up residence in Jeanie, and the sound of scraping hands at the iron bars. Outside the cemetery walls, Lizzie once again heard children singing, saw the bobbing turnip lanterns, and she ran back towards her home, hoping that Laura would be there already, safe and sound and far from corpse-flowers and goblin men with enticing fruit. She tried to think of Jeanie stroking her cheek, and not of the Jeanie-thing with her mad eyes and her mouth full of vines, speaking as if she was a chorus in one body. 

_She’s alive, and I’ll save her, and Laura too, _Lizzie vowed. _I’ll make sure of it. She won’t become more fodder for their enchanted fruit. I’ll stop it all myself. For Laura. For Jeanie. For me. And once it’s safe, I’ll come back to the graveyard. I’ll make another dumb supper and I’ll find out how to get whatever’s in Jeanie out of her. _

In the bare branches of the autumn trees, the wind sounded like it was laughing. 

**Author's Note:**

> Your prompts were just so amazing! I had a great time writing for you! 
> 
> As for other notes, the dumb supper is an actual tradition which probably has some of its roots in love-divination rituals. You serve dinner and hope to see a ghost, basically. Sometimes it's the ghost of a loved one, sometimes it's the spirit of your future husband. I went with the more generalized "communing with your loved one" version. Likewise, soul-cakes are an actual (delicious) thing. They seemed appropriately Halloweeny for a Trick or Treat fic, and supernaturally-charged food seemed appropriate for a Goblin Market one. 
> 
> Title is, obviously, from Goblin Market.


End file.
